The Writers Guild of America East’s governing body is making recommendations for changes to the Guild’s constitution and has passed a new organizing resolution that would address recent debate over the influx of digital journalists into the union.
The Guild announced after a Council vote on Thursday evening that the Council is proposing constitutional modifications geared toward making sure all work sectors the union is involved in are represented in leadership. The Council is suggesting that vice president positions on the Council be created in three areas — film/TV/streaming, broadcast/cable/streaming news and online media — “to ensure that members from all work sectors are represented on the union’s governing body.” A referendum on the suggestion, which would need to be approved by members to be passed, will be conducted later this spring, according to the union. The WGA East is organizing town hall discussions this month for members to offer more information on the suggestion, and has offered a hashtag in its efforts to promote it: #NextChapter. The Council is unanimously recommending the constitutional changes.
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Moreover, the Council announced that it has approved an organizing resolution that calls for an organizing committee composed of members across work sectors that will work with staff on future campaigns. The resolution also entails an increase to the Guild’s organizing budget “to aggressively grow the Guild equitably across all sectors.”
“The WGAE Council has spent the last several months working together and with an outside facilitator. I think I speak for everyone involved when I say that it has been a learning process in which everyone exchanged ideas and listened to one another,” WGA East president Michael Winship said in a statement. “Now we have united. I’m enthusiastic about the result and the next chapter for this brave union of storytellers.”
Council member Gail Lee, who works in broadcast, shared in a statement that “Reaching agreement on these changes wasn’t easy.” Nonetheless, she said, “I am proud of everyone’s willingness on Council to have the difficult but necessary conversations.” Added Council member and digital media member Sara David, “I’m thrilled that our governing body has not only created an agreement to increase and formalize our commitment to organizing but also built a process to collaborate with each other on finding solutions to challenges across all work sectors.”
The Guild’s elected Council and membership has been engaged in an internal debate over the union’s changing composition following aggressive organizing in the digital news space for some time. In the summer of 2021, the Guild Council controversially informed members that it was putting a “pause” on digital news organizing efforts as it conducted a “thorough assessment” of member priorities. In that message, the Council stated that organizing had “significantly changed the news-to-freelance ratio among the membership” and taken up a significant amount of the annual budget. Not long after, however, eight members of the Council announced in their own, counter-statement that they had voted against sending the message and posited that the issue was not budgetary, but “a conflict between Council members over who belongs in the WGAE and who does not.”
The discussion grew ever more heated during the summer of 2021’s Council election, when two slates emerged with diverging viewpoints on how to handle the influx of digital journalists. One slate, critical of digital organizing’s impact on the Guild, argued for a restructuring that would allow different units to handle their own affairs independently, while another argued for a more collective approach, saying that the Guild needed to keep organizing digital newsrooms to amplify its power. The latter ticket ended up emerging triumphant, with all seven of its candidates winning seats.
The Guild’s controversial “pause” on digital organizing ended on Feb. 16, after the Guild’s Council vote unanimously in favor of further organizing in the industry. Still, elected Guild leadership appeared to be engaged in active soul-searching over the union’s future: In the announcement to members about the return to digital organizing, Council members said that since the 2020 Council elections, they had engaged in “hundreds of hours of meetings” and “a series of intense but productive sessions with an outside labor facilitator and labor lawyer.” In late February the Guild announced to members that it had sent them a short survey by email to “help shape the Guild’s future.” The Guild added, “The responses we receive will guide WGAE leadership to some important decisions about the future of the union.” The survey closed on March 12.
In the meantime, the WGA East’s work in the digital news space has continued. Since the beginning of the year, WGA East-affiliated unions at Slate, Salon and Fast Company have ratified their second contracts, and in early March Guild members at Gizmodo Media Group staged a six-day strike that ended in a collective bargaining agreement that was ratified on March 9. The Guild also currently bargains on behalf of digital writers at Vice Media, Vox Media, Hearst Magazines, Bustle Digital Group, HuffPost and The Intercept, among others.
